Dojcinovic on War Crimes: Definition, History, Practice

Predrag Dojcinovic, University of Connecticut, Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute; International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (1998-2017), has published War Crimes: Definition, History, Practice. Here is the abstract.

This encyclopedic entry on war crimes provides insights into their definition, historical development, and application in major international criminal trials. As some of the gravest offenses under international law, war crimes involve serious violations of international humanitarian law committed during armed conflict. Defined in Article 8 of the 1998 Rome Statute, they include targeting civilians, torture, and using child soldiers. Rooted in ancient norms and shaped by Grotius, the Lieber Code, and the Hague Conventions, the concept evolved significantly through the 1949 Geneva Conventions and the 1977 Additional Protocols (APs), which extended protections to civilians and non-international conflicts. Enforcement by tribunals like Nuremberg, ICTY, ICTR, and the ICC has established clear jurisprudence, affirming individual criminal responsibility and refining the legal elements of war crimes.

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Bohrer on The "Jolly Roger"

Ziv Bohrer, Bar-Ilan University Faculty of Law, is publishing The ‘Jolly Roger’ (Pirate Flag) in International Law's Objects (Jessie Hohmann and Daniel Joyce, eds., 2019) (forthcoming). Here is the abstract.

Presently, a black flag with a skull-and-crossbones (the ‘Jolly Roger’) is merely a cultural icon for piracy. This chapter excavates the flag’s deep roots in international law. Part I uncovers that the flag used to be a laws-of-war signal for the intention to take no prisoners (‘deny quarter’). It was used not only by pirates. Intriguingly, the flag’s history aids in exposing misconceptions regarding criminal justice. Domestic criminal law is considered the traditional form of criminal justice, whereas international criminal law is considered a novel, post-WWII, creation. Piracy is deemed the only long-standing international crime, because for centuries universal jurisdiction has extended over it. However, historically, universal jurisdiction was applied not only to piracy, but also to felonies (crimes classified today as domestic) and war crimes. Part II discusses that actual history of criminal justice and shows that it and the Jolly Roger’s legal history were forgotten for similar reasons.

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Witt on Two Humanitarianisms in Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" @JohnFabianWitt

John Fabian Witt, Yale University Law School, has published Two Humanitarianisms in Ambrose Bierce's 'An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge'. Here is the abstract.

The oft-anthologized short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Union Army veteran Ambrose Bierce — long a staple of high school curricula and the subject of music videos, television, and film — is not typically thought of as a study in the dilemmas of humanitarian law. But it is. It depicts an execution for violation of the laws of war. Even better, the text embodies a central tension in the laws of war, one that emerged in Bierce’s time and persists today. On the one hand stands a sentimental humanitarianism that aims to minimize the human suffering of war; Henri Dunant’s book, A Memory of Solferino popularized this stance and helped establish the International Committee of the Red Cross in 1863. On the other hand, a righteous humanitarianism chafes at the constraints that sentimental humanitarianism places on the pursuit of justice. Romantic nationalists like the Prussian-American political thinker Francis Lieber, whose code of rules for the Union Army was published a year after Dunant’s book, embrace the righteous justice of particular causes. Bierce’s “Owl Creek” straddles the two planks of the modern laws of war, conveying the power of both views.

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Cheah and Vormbaum on British War Crimes Trials in Europe and Asia, 1945-1949: A Comparative Study @Cheah_WL

W. L. Cheah, National University of Singapore, Faculty of Law, and Moritz Vormbaum, Humboldt University of Berlin, are publishing British War Crimes Trials in Europe and Asia, 1945–1949: A Comparative Study in the Leiden Journal of International Law. Here is the abstract.

Between 1945 and 1949, the British military conducted a large number of war crimes trials in Europe and Asia. Based on historical archival records, among other sources, this article evaluates and compares the British authorities’ implementation of the 1945 Royal Warrant and war crimes trials in Europe and Asia, with a specific focus on trials organized in Germany and Singapore. By examining the British war crimes trial experience in those two jurisdictions, the article analyses factors shaping the evolution of the Royal Warrant’s legal framework and trial model in different contexts. It therefore contributes to the growing historical work on post-Second World War trials and current debates among scholars of transitional justice and international criminal law on the contextual factors that impact on war crimes trials.

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Petrovic on International Legal Protection for Culture at Risk in War @MonashUni

Jadranka Petrovic, Monash University, is publishing International Legal Protection for Culture at Risk in War in volume 18 of International Humanitarian Law Magazine (2016). Here is the abstract.

Cultural objects have been innocent victims of warfare from time immemorial. While some destruction has been incidental, frequently objects which are today considered 'cultural property' have been targeted willfully. These include immovable structures (eg, buildings and bridges) and movable objects (eg, artworks, books) which have architectural, historical, artistic, archaeological or scientific interest. The deliberate destruction of the world's largest Buddha statutes in Afghanistan, the looting of Iraq's national museum and the ongoing cultural onslaught on Aleppo, Palmyra and other cultural property sites in Syria, are the recent grim reminders that cultural wrongs ate not buried in the past. In fact, since the 1990s, with the changing nature of armed conflict and the escalation of terrorism and other non-conventional methods of warfare, the mistreatment of cultural property has intensified. Cultural property - with its symbolic, identity-generating and economic dimensions - has increasingly become the target of deliberate and systematic attacks. This is often done with the aim to belittle, humiliate and shock the 'other', permanently scare them away from their territory, 'erase' the past and provoke public outrage. It has been observed - particularly in relation to ISIS (the armed group which has brutally destroyed cultural heritage in present day Iraq and Syria) and the powerful tools they use for disseminating their savage acts - that the loss of human life has become such a regular feature in the coverage of conflict that it often takes something beyond the 'ordinary' to draw attention. These acts and similarly vicious approaches to cultural property are in disturbing dissonance with law.

The full text is not available from SSRN.

Gordon on The Propaganda Prosecutions at Nuremberg: The Origins of Atrocity Speech Law and the Touchstone for Normative Evolution

Gregory S. Gordon, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Faculty of Law, is publishing The Propaganda Prosecutions at Nuremberg: The Origin of Atrocity Speech Law and the Touchstone for Normative Evolution is volume 39 of the Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review (2017). Here is the abstract.

The black and white image of a two-tiered bench seating the cream of surviving Nazi leadership, framed by white-helmeted Allied sentries and dark-wood paneling, is by now the definitive meme for the birth of international criminal law (ICL). Less associated with that grainy photograph, though, is the origin of an important sub-branch of ICL – one that I call “atrocity speech law.” For among the defendants in that iconic Nuremberg dock were Julius Streicher, editor-in-chief of the rabidly anti-Semitic tabloid Der Stürmer, and Hans Frtizsche, head of the Radio Division of Joseph Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry. Nearly two years later, the Third Reich’s Press Chief, Otto Dietrich, assumed his place on the same set of pews as part of the Ministries trial of the so-called “subsequent Nuremberg proceedings.” From the judgments rendered in respect of these three defendants, Allied judges formulated a set of nascent but influential principles regulating the relationship between hate speech and large-scale human rights violations. This article, an invited submission for a special symposium issue on the Nuremberg trials, revisits those cases, which centered on persecution as a crime against humanity. In doing so, the article provides an overview of Nazi Holocaust propaganda, the rhetorical template for the modern mass-murder campaign. Within this historical context, it traces the development of atrocity speech law in the decades since, paying particular attention to the normative wellsprings of incitement to genocide at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). And its analysis regarding persecution’s subsequent development provides an indispensable point of repair for understanding the jurisprudential split between the ICTR (concluding that hate speech on its own can satisfy persecution’s conduct element) and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) (reaching the opposite conclusion). As the article points out, on balance, the Nuremberg jurisprudence favors the ICTR approach. With important contemporary cases before domestic courts, the ICTY and the International Criminal Court, the Nuremberg propaganda judgments will continue to function as important doctrinal touchstones going forward. This article, which develops and expands on the Nazi propaganda sections featured in my recently-released Oxford University Press book, “Atrocity Speech Law: Foundation, Fragmentation, Fruition,” permits readers to see the Nuremberg judgments in a new light and understand their likely normative impact on international hate speech law for generations to come.

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Bazyler on The Holocaust at Nuremberg: What the Record Reveals @MichaelBazyler

Michael J. Bazyler, Chapman University School of Law, is publishing The Holocaust at Nuremberg: What the Record Reveals in volume 39 of the Loyola (L.A.) International and Comparative Law Review (2017). Here is the abstract.

Historians continue to debate how much of the International Military Tribunal (IMT) proceedings at Nuremberg concerned the Holocaust. The official goal of the Allies in Europe was to end the war by militarily defeating Nazi Germany. Stopping the atrocities was of secondary importance. Once the war ended and the top Nazis were put on trial at Nuremberg, they were not tried for the mass murder of the Jews. Chief Nuremberg prosecutor Justice Robert Jackson announced at trial that the supreme crime committed by the twenty-one German defendants on the dock was the crime of waging aggressive war. This article aims to show that during the IMT trial, the genocide of the Jews — today known by the term Holocaust — was a running theme of the trial. To illustrate the significance of the subject of Jewish persecution at the IMT, the article examines actual testimony and other evidence introduced by the prosecution during each stage of the trial. Those who mine the IMT proceedings will find much about the fate of the Jews in territories under Nazi occupation. The historiography of the Holocaust began at Nuremberg.

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Brockman-Hawe on Bismarck's Proposal for an International Criminal Court to Assign Responsibility for the Franco-Prussian War

Ben Brockman-Hawe is publishing Punishing Warmongers for Their 'Mad and Criminal Projects' - Bismarck's Proposal for an International Criminal Court to Assign Responsibility for the Franco-Prussian War in volume 52 of the Tulsa Law Review (2016). Here is the abstract.

The idea of punishing aggressive war is routinely presented as having been first conceived of in the wake of the First World War. This conventional narrative is incorrect; the intellectual seed for the project had begun to take root long before, in the reactions to the interstate conflicts of the nineteenth century. This article explores one of the most significant moments from aggression’s unappreciated ‘pre-history’; Chancellor Bismarck’s pursuit of a trial before an international criminal court of the Franco-Prussian War’s (1870-1) French ‘intellectual originators and instigators.’ Although the proposal ultimately failed to attract the political and public support necessary for its implementation, it prompted in its own time an unprecedented discussion on the viability of international criminal responsibility for aggression and international criminal courts. The proposal later took on new life as both a precedent and an anti-precedent as these ideas resurfaced periodically after 1870. The goal of this paper is to restore Bismarck’s proposal to its rightful place in the story of the crime’s development. At stake is more than historic fidelity; contemporary expectations of what international criminal law can accomplish, what circumstances should or could accompany international criminal law’s invocation, and what the parameters of the crime of aggression should be are shaped by such histories. As the 2010 Kampala Amendments to the Rome Statute are now a single accession away from accumulating the requisite number of ratifications to come into effect, raising the prospect that the International Criminal Court will imminently be tasked with adjudicating the first aggression case in over seventy years, the need for reflection on these issues has taken on unusual salience.

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Tourkochoriti on Challenging Historical Facts and National Truths: An Analysis of Cases From France and Greece @IoannaTourkocho

Ioanna Tourkochoriti, Harvard Law School and National University of Ireland, Galway, School of Law, is publishing Challenging Historical Facts and National Truths: An Analysis of Cases from France and Greece in Law and Memory: Addressing Historical Injustice by Law (U. Belavusau and & A. Gliszczyńska-Grabias, eds., Cambridge University Press (2017).

The denial of crimes against humanity is a criminal offense in various European legal orders, e.g. France. The European Union has endorsed this approach through a Council Framework Decision that crystallizes legislation already existing in a number of Member States and asks others to consider enacting measures criminalizing this category of speech. This paper discusses the dangers for academic freedom from the need to express our collective disapproval of atrocities against humanity through memory laws. Memory laws serve collective needs, they express collective imaginaries that can be associated with a national identity or with a European conception of shared values. Drawing from Durkheim’s analysis of the collective consciousness it signals the dangers that exist when the irrational elements that form this consciousness win over the rational elements. Memory laws can serve to prescribe or proscribe an official version of historical truth. Using the mechanisms of state constraint against opinions that are contrary to this official version of the truth can be very dangerous for individual and collective liberties. This paper examines a number of cases where courts have imposed legal sanctions to those who made claims either denying the Holocaust, or challenging elements of national identity that seemed unacceptable to national authorities as well as legislative proposals attempting to impose an official version of historical facts. It also points out inconsistencies in the relevant case law of the European Court of Human Rights.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Wilson @richardawilson7 on Propaganda and History in International Criminal Trials

Richard Ashby Wilson, University of Connecticut School of Law, is publishing Propaganda and History in International Criminal Trials in the Journal of International Criminal Justice (2016). Here is the abstract.

In the course of prosecuting crimes against humanity, international criminal tribunals from the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg to the International Criminal Court (ICC) have provided accounts of the origins and causes of mass atrocities. Their historical narratives exhibit a common feature that has not been remarked upon, and that is the central role they assign to political propaganda in explaining popular participation in mass crimes. Judges have invoked propaganda to answer one of the most vexing questions at international criminal tribunals: why neighbor turned against neighbor and committed extreme acts of collective violence in contexts characterized by long periods of co-existence. This article evaluates the evidence for claims regarding the role of propaganda and concludes that eyewitness evidence for the causal role of propaganda is often slender and unconvincing. Insiders and material perpetrators more often than not repudiate their original testimony amid allegations of intimidation and bribery. At times, judges have balked at expert evidence on propaganda and refused to recognize it as germane to a criminal trial. Given the relative paucity of evidence for a directly causal role, why has propaganda become one of the overarching narratives that international courts employ to explain atrocities during armed conflicts? How does the model of causation customarily used in criminal law shape the kind of histories that international courts write? In answering these questions, the article refers to the unique model of causation used in criminal law, the apolitical nature of propaganda as an historical explanation, and the moral expressivist function of criminal courts.

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Adler on the Pleasures of Punishment: Complicity, Spectatorship, and Abu Ghraib

Amy Adler, New York University School of Law, has published The Pleasures of Punishment: Complicity, Spectatorship, and Abu Ghraib, in Photography in Punishment in Popular Culture 236 (Austin Sarat and Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., eds., 2015). Here is the abstract.

At the same time that the Supreme Court has come to insist on a radical distinction between representations of sex and violence as a matter of constitutional law, never have the two genres been more deeply intertwined, in popular entertainment, of course, but also in certain practices of punishment. This paper considers the phenomenon of “torture porn” to explore not only representations of torture and humiliation in popular culture, but also the ways in which popular culture has shaped practices of punishment. Here I explore photographs of Abu Ghraib (as well as other legal and cultural disputes over the disclosure of photographs of torture) to explore the ways in which the popular vernaculars of pornography and smart phone photography informed the practice of torture. I compare the photos to a burgeoning genre of reality TV shows from the same era in which in which the spectacle of humiliation, punishment and even torture plays a pivotal and seemingly pleasurable role in the drama. In both scenarios, I focus not only on the mixture of sexuality and violence, pleasure and punishment, but also on the critical role of the camera. Ultimately by analyzing the similarities between “torture porn” in popular entertainment and the visual materials produced at Abu Ghraib, I suggest a mutually productive relationship between popular culture and punishment.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link. 

Labuda on the Lieber Code, Retaliation, and the Origins of International Criminal Law

Patryk I. Labuda, University of Geneva, Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian law and Human Rights, has published The Lieber Code, Retaliation and the Origins of International Criminal Law in 3 Historical Origins of International Criminal Law 299-341 (M. Bergamo et al., TOAEP, 2015).

This chapter assesses when and how war crimes trials emerged as the primary method of sanctioning law of war violations. It argues that the rise of individual criminal accountability in the late 19th century should be viewed as a counterpoint to a separate and overlooked process of delegitimizing belligerent reprisals. Taken together, these two phenomena are part of the history of individualizing and humanizing international law in the late 19th and early 20th century.

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Gordon on the History of International Criminal Law and War Crimes at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century

Gregory S. Gordon, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Faculty of Law, has published International Criminal Law's 'Oriental Pre-Birth': The 1894-1900 Trials of the Siamese, Ottomans and Chinese in 4 Historical Origins of International Criminal Law 119 (M. Bergsmo et. al., TOAEP, 2015). Here is the abstract.

Conventional wisdom often traces the origins of international criminal law (ICL) to the 1474 prosecution for atrocities in Alsace of Burgundian governor Peter von Hagenbach and then straight to the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials post-World War II. But this paper demonstrates that history has ignored a remarkable decade at the end of the nineteenth century when three international criminal proceedings with links to the Orient took place: (1) in 1894, a French-Siamese mixed court sat in judgment of Phra Yot, a Siamese governor charged with the death of a French military commander; (2) in 1898, an International Military Commission of four European powers prosecuted versions of war crimes and crimes against humanity arising from Muslim-Christian inter-communal violence on the Ottoman-controlled island of Crete; and (3) in 1900, another international criminal tribunal, this one also consisting of four European powers, presided over the trial of participants in the Boxer Rebellion for proto-crimes against humanity. The paper describes the origins of these three "Oriental" tribunals, including an overview of the noble, and at turns, cynical rationales that inspired the Great Powers to turn to adjudication efforts and international processes. ICL scholarship has examined the trials separately but never together, within their broader historical context. Doing so reveals that they took place during an odd confluence of European colonialism's apogee and the international peace movement's founding. This fascinating period features the erosion of the Congress of Vienna framework, Industrial Revolution demand for overseas cheap labor, raw materials, and new markets, and nascent efforts at establishing transnational arbitral institutions. While Africa was carved up among the European powers at the 1884 Berlin Conference, there was no such orderly division of territory in the Orient. The paper posits that the featured trials are the product of peace movement arbitral impulses in coping with outbursts of violence and resulting tensions among the Europeans competing for imperial possessions in the context of that violence -- without a Berlin Conference-style regional master plan. The trials anticipated many important ICL developments, including proto-formulations of war crimes and crimes against humanity and the establishment of ad hoc and hybrid tribunals. But, sadly, they did not pave the way for Allied use of ICL to achieve justice in the imminent wake of World War I. At that point in history, the Europeans were ready to sit in judgment of their imperial subjects but not of themselves. Thus, these remarkable ICL efforts seem more a subliminal outgrowth of the era's Zeitgeist than a needed groundwork for post-Versailles justice. Still, when viewed holistically and contextually, these late-nineteenth century inquests supply an important missing link between the Hagenbach trial and the proper advent of ICL in the twentieth century.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

John Q. Barrett on the Opening of the Nuremberg Trials

John Q. Barrett, St. John's University School of Law; Robert H. Jackson Center, has published Opening the Nuremberg Trial: The Moment of November 20, 1945 as St. John's University Legal Studies Research Paper No. 15-0032. Here is the abstract.

On November 20, 1945, the International Military Tribunal (IMT), created by the victorious World War II Allied powers, began criminal trial proceedings in Nuremberg in the Allied-occupied former Germany. This first and only international Nuremberg trial involved twenty-one individual defendants and six organizations that had been leading parts of Nazi Germany’s government and war-waging. On November 20, 2015, the 70th anniversary of the start of the Nuremberg trial, the city of Nuremberg hosted in the trial site, Palace of Justice Courtroom 600, a discussion among three men who worked there during 1945-46. Dr. Yves Beigbeder served as an assistant to French judge Henri Donnedieu de Vabres. Father Moritz Fuchs was the bodyguard of United States Chief of Counsel Robert H. Jackson. Dr. George Sakheim was an interpreter and translator in the Interrogation Division, U.S. Office of Chief of Counsel. These introductory remarks preceded the panel discussion. I describe some of the dimensions, including military power, political decision making, legal concepts, personalities and logistics, that led the Allies to the Nuremberg courtroom in November 1945.

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Defining Crimes Against Humanity

Margaret M. DeGuzman, Temple University School of Law, has published The Elusive Essence of Crimes Against Humanity in For the Sake of Present and Future Generations: Essays on International Law, Crime and Justice in Honour of Roger S. Clark (William A. Schabas et al., eds., Brill/Nijhoff, 2015). Here is the abstract.

As efforts to adopt an international convention on crimes against humanity gain momentum it becomes increasingly important for the international community to clarify the conceptual underpinnings of this category of international crimes. This book chapter seeks to contribute to that process by elucidating a tension between the two goals animating the definition: the goals of identifying crimes that ‘shock the conscience of humanity’ and of distinguishing crimes against humanity from ‘ordinary’ crimes subject to national adjudication.

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A Response To David Luban's Reassessment of Hannah Arendt On Genocide

Luis Pereira Coutinho, University of Lisbon School of Law, has published Hannah Arendt's Moral Ontology: Comments on David Luban's Arendt on the Crime of Crimes at 28 Ratio Juris 326 (2015). Here is the abstract.

David Luban identifies a tension between Arendt's conception of ethnic identification in a context of persecution and her conception of humanity. That tension pertains to the reality - or realities - that Arendt addresses: the moral reality of her Bildung that appears throughout her work, and is centered on the “dignity of man,” on the one hand, and the divisive, “political” reality that she was forced to face when “attacked as a Jew,” on the other. By implicitly accepting that in a context of persecution one cannot escape the framing relevance of the “political” - an idea that is also present in her imaginary condemnation speech of Eichmann - Arendt betrays a fundamental theme of her work: “forgiveness” and the inherent possibility of a “new beginning.”

The full text is not available for free from SSRN.

Reassessing Arendt On Genocide

David J. Luban, Georgetown University Law Center, has published Arendt on the Crime of Crimes at 28 Ratio Juris 307 (2015). Here is the abstract.

Genocide is the intentional destruction of a group as such. What makes groups important, over and above the individual worth of the group's members? This paper explores Hannah Arendt's efforts to answer that question, and concludes that she failed. In the course of the argument, it examines her understanding of Jewish history, her ideas about “the social,” and her conception of “humanity” as a normative stance toward international responsibility rather than a descriptive concept.

The full text is not available free from SSRN.

A Review Essay of David Luban's Torture, Power, and Law

Milan Markovic, Texas A&M University School of Law, is publishing Of Monsters and Lawyers in Criminal Justice Ethics. Here is the abstract.

This is a review essay of David Luban's important and prescient new book, Torture, Power, and Law. The review essay focuses on two of Luban's central arguments: The fallacious trade-off between civil liberties and national security after the 9/11 attacks and the manipulation of anti-torture law by Bush administration lawyers. Although I largely agree with Luban's analysis, I contend that the "coercive interrogation program" and other war on terror policies cannot be fully understood without considering anti-Muslim attitudes in the United States. I also question whether, in analyzing the ethics of government lawyers, the distinction between frivolous and non-frivolous legal positions is as marked as Luban suggests.

Download the review essay from SSRN at the link.

Hannah Arendt and Genocide

David Luban, Georgetown University Law Center, is publishing Arendt on the Crime of Crimes in Ratio Juris (forthcoming). Here is the abstract.

Genocide - the intentional destruction of groups “as such” – is sometimes called the “crime of crimes,” but explaining what makes it the crime of crimes is no easy task. Why are groups important over and above the individuals who make them up? Hannah Arendt tried to explain the uniqueness of genocide, but the claim of this paper is that she failed. The claim is simple, but the reasons cut deep.

Genocide, in Arendt’s view, “is an attack upon human diversity as such.” So far so good; but it is hard to square with Arendt’s highly individualistic conception of human diversity, which in her systematic philosophy refers to the multiplicity of unique human individuals, never of groups. Indeed, Arendt is famously skeptical of views that subordinate individuality to group identity. That makes her theorizing an instructive test case of whether individualism can yield an account of why groups matter.

The paper analyzes several possible approaches to the problem of explaining the special value of groups, beginning with Raphael Lemkin’s theory of groups as contributors to universal civilization, and then turning to Arendt’s efforts. In the course of the argument, it examines her understanding of Jewish history, her ideas about “the social,” and her conception of “humanity” as a normative stance toward international responsibility rather than a descriptive concept. For Arendt, group identification makes sense solely as a political act of resistance to persecution. In the conclusion, the paper examines a remarkable moment during the trial of Radovan Karadzić, when a defense witness explained his conversion to radical nationalism by quoting “Mrs. Hannah Arendt, a prominent philosopher.” The moment illustrates how hard it is to maintain the stance of humanity while assigning political value to group identity.

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A Study of Radovan Karadzic and the Charges Against Him

New from Cambridge University Press:

Robert J. Donia, Radovan Karadžič: Architect of the Bosnian Genocide

Radovan Karadžić, leader of the Bosnian Serb nationalists during the Bosnian War (1992–1995), stands accused of genocide and other crimes of war before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. This book traces the origins of the extreme violence of the war to the utopian national aspirations of the Serb Democratic Party and Karadžić's personal transformation from an unremarkable family man to the powerful leader of the Bosnian Serb nationalists. Based on previously unused documents from the tribunal's archives and many hours of Karadžić's cross-examination at his trial, the author shows why and how the Bosnian Serb leader planned and directed the worst atrocities in Europe since the Second World War. This book provocatively argues that postcommunist democracy was a primary enabler of mass atrocities because it provided the means to mobilize large numbers of Bosnian Serbs for the campaign to eliminate non-Serbs from conquered land.

Published September 2014; $33 paperback.  Also available in hardcover; $90. Robert J. Donia is Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.